War, Empire, and the Military

These 127 essays, although organized under seven headings, have one underlying theme: opposition to the warfare state that robs us of our liberty, our money, and in some cases our life. This is the companion volume to War, Christianity, and the State.

Description

With War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Police, Laurence Vance, a relentless critic of the state and its wars, has updated his already extensive writings on war and empire to include new material in this volume not included in earlier collections of essays.

These essays, although organized under seven headings, have one underlying theme: opposition to the warfare state that robs us of our liberty, our money, and in some cases our life. Conservatives who decry the welfare state while supporting the warfare state are terribly inconsistent. The two are inseparable. Libertarians who are opposed to war on principle, but support the state’s bogus “war on terrorism,” even as they remain silent about the U.S. global empire, are likewise contradictory.

Vance notes in the introduction: “It is my desire in all of these essays to show, as Randolph Bourne said many years ago, that ‘war is the health of the state.’”

For newcomers to libertarian foreign policy analyses, Laurence Vance’s work will be a refreshing and novel approach that builds on the foreign policy work of Murray Rothbard while bringing new insights to modern questions of foreign intervention and the use of military force.

Even for those familiar with libertarian critiques of state warmaking, this volume will present a variety of refreshers of various libertarian approaches toward examining foreign policy, while infusing a variety of new modern examples into the debate.